Global TALES feasibility study: Personal narratives in 10-year-old children around the world

Abstract

Personal narratives make up more than half of children’s conversations. The ability to share personal narratives helps build and maintain friendships, promotes physical and emotional wellbeing, supports classroom participation, and underpins academic success and vocational outcomes. Although personal narratives are a universal discourse genre, cross-cultural and cross-linguistic research into children’s ability to share personal narratives is in its infancy. The current study addresses this gap in the research by developing the Global TALES protocol, a protocol comprising six scripted prompts for eliciting personal narratives in school-age children (excited, worried, annoyed, proud, problem situation, something important). We evaluated its feasibility with 249 ten-year-old children from 10 different countries, speaking 8 different languages, and analyzed researchers’ views on the process of adapting the protocol for use in their own country/language. At group-level, the protocol elicited discourse samples from all children, although individual variability was evident, with most children providing responses to all six prompts. When investigating the topics of children’s personal narratives in response to the prompts, we found that children from around the world share many commonalities regarding topics of conversation. Once again individual variability was high, indicating the protocol is effective in prompting children to share their past personal experiences without forcing them to focus on one particular topic. Feedback from the participating researchers on the use of the protocol in their own countries was generally positive, although several translation issues were noted. Based on our results, we now invite clinical researchers from around the world to join us in conducting further research into this important area of practice to obtain a better understanding of the development of personal narratives from children across different languages and cultures and to begin to establish local benchmarks of performance.

Personal Narratives of 10-Year-Old Children in Iceland: Verbal Productivity, Word Diversity, and Topics

“…The purpose of the current study, therefore, was to investigate personal narratives of Icelandic monolingual children by using the Global TALES (2018) protocol [5]. To fill gaps in the current knowledge base, the following research questions were addressed.…”

“…We also assumed that the Icelandic group would need similar amounts of scripted follow-up prompting for eliciting the stories as the children in other countries. Since Iceland is a modern society, similar to many of the participating countries utilizing the Global TALES protocol, we assumed that the topic of children's responses would be in line with the results of that study [6].…”

“…The recruitment of the participants followed the procedure of the initial Global TALES study [6]. The inclusion criteria were monolingual Icelandic-speaking children approximately 10 years of age with no history of language and learning difficulties and currently not receiving speech and language therapy or special education.…”

“…The mean number of total words ranged across the six questions from 75 words (Q1) to 111 words (Q5) (see Fig 2). A one-way ANOVA showed no significant difference between the six stories (F(5, 156) = 1.41, p = 0.22) for the TNW In accordance with the initial Global TALES study [6], we also investigated if scripted follow-up prompts were needed to elicit a response. Results showed that 33% of the children did require a scripted follow-up prompt for protocol prompts number 2 (worried) and 6 (important), 22% for protocol prompts number 1 (excited) and 4 (proud), 30% for protocol number 5 (problem-solving), and 11% for protocol prompt number 3 (annoyed).…”

“…We used the same Global TALES protocol [5] in the current study. However, the data collection was conducted online because of the COVID-19 pandemic.…”